My Professional Learning Network – Day 1

I’ve been using Twitter since 2010 and mainly use it to find interesting ideas about teaching English to adult speakers of other languages (TESOL). As I got a bit braver, I started retweeting things that interested me, and I even tweeted a few links to some resources I made on my old website, slurpenglish.com.

That is as about as far as my online professional learning network (PLN) has gone so far. In the offline world, I have great colleagues that I discuss TESOL teaching with on a day-to-day basis. We share resources we have created or discovered.

The task for Assignment 2 of my Connected Learning course is to develop my contribution within a PLN. I am going to choose speaking activities in the TESOL classroom because I am always looking for ways to improve my teaching of communication and the activities that I give my students. I need to expand the reach of my currently limited PLN. Here is my plan:

• Save some hashtags relating to TESOL communication on Twitter, read it daily and retweet the interesting ones
• Start using hashtags in my tweets (can’t believe I haven’t done this much so far!)
• Start communicating with other users on Twitter, asking questions, commenting and so on
• Join online groups, perhaps Reddit
• Follow more bloggers who are interested in TESOL communication
• Find TESOL communication activities online and review on my blog

Here are some additional things I could do on this blog:

• Create more content for other teachers to use.
• Record some videos or music
• Create infographics to illustrate my thoughts and findings

Shortly, I’ll get around to mapping my PLN to the framework provided by Ito et al.

Phew! That’s a lot. I wonder how much I will do?

References:

Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., Schor, J., Sefton-   Green, J., & Craig Watkins, S. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. Retrieved from https://dmlhub.net/publications/connected-learning-agenda-for-research-and-design/